Electra

The Chorus breaks off their singing, having heard a cry from far off. They call Electra out from the house, telling her, “I heard a voice of death” (752). As they wonder whose cry was heard, a Messenger (one of Orestes’s servants) arrives. He proclaims joyfully that Aegisthus is dead. At Electra’s prompting, he tells her in detail how Orestes killed Aegisthus, telling him that he was a visitor from Thessaly and striking him while they sacrificed a bull. Aegisthus’s attendants rushed to defend their master, but lay down their arms when they recognized Orestes.

Electra and the Chorus sing joyfully of Orestes’s triumph as Orestes and Pylades enter with Aegisthus’s corpse. Electra greets Orestes, who shows her the body and urges her to leave it unburied for the animals to eat. Electra is at first hesitant to dishonor the dead, but eventually decides to do as Orestes suggested. Electra launches into a tirade in which she says everything she wished to tell Aegisthus while he was still alive, attacking his treachery and greed and even insinuating that Clytemnestra was unfaithful to him, as she had once been unfaithful to her previous husband Agamemnon.